I have yet again competed in the 0hgame challenge, where one is to make a game in “zero” hours, or when the time gets set back due to the end of daylight savings time.

Yet again I will be thanking video game name generator for the idea and concept. Brace yourselves for:

Radical Harvest Pimps

What a fitting topic for the Halloween season? Onto how I implement this in the game. You play as the farmer, and you must defend your harvest of pumpkins from one greedy pimp, who desires to kidnap and sell your pumpkins for himself. His legs are stronger. How long can you hold him off?

You start with a score of 5. You gain points by touching a pumpkin. You lose points by letting the pimp take the pumpkin.

As a lot of fellow users of the Z-shell, I have oh-my-zsh installed to make installing plugins and themes easier. One issue I was having earlier today was every time I typed a command or pressed return, it would delay for a couple seconds while displaying ‘xcodebuild’ and then ‘git’ in the title bar. This was very frustrating, as it made quick work more difficult.

After a while, I thought manually updating the repository would be helpful. I went into ~/.oh-my-zsh and ran `git pull`. I then received a message saying similar to You must run as root to agree to the license. It hit me that I did an update of the Xcode command line tools earlier in the day. I ran `sudo xcodebuild` and followed the prompts to accept the license. This caused the delays to vanish. Thought I would share if anyone else had a similar problem.

Just yesterday, the news broke of a large exploit in popular software that powers the security of large parts of the internet. Within minutes of hearing about it for the first time, I took action to protect my website, even though it was midnight and I was super tired.

My website was secured well before some other large ones were. For extra security, I generated new security keys (my certificate was to expire in a week anyway). Hopefully an exploit of this magnitude will not occur again anytime soon.

Today I attempted to download a game I wrote many years ago as a little kid to play again for a small dose of nostalgia. What do I find? Norton removed the file not because it contained a virus, but due to a “reputation” algorithm. I would never inject malicious code into my applications, however the multitude of users relying on such “Anti-virus” software would see the alert and forever remember me as a person attempting to cause harm to their computers. A simple “helpful” algorithm intended to prevent viruses leads to lost trust in applications developers and hurt feelings for game makers simply attempting to replay their past creations.

Being the type of person who learns by examples, reading information on Wikipedia and given a synopsis by another person is not enough to totally understand a concept. There is a guide that, in my opinion, gives a nice overview of how this measure of function efficiency works. I recommend visiting A Beginner’s Guide to Big O Notation. It was very helpful for me, and I hope it can be useful to you.